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Just around the bend: A brave new driverless world

Coming soon: Cars that don't need YOU to drive them (though you're welcome to come along for the ride). Barry Petersen has been checking them out:

When the car of the future comes along, you can bet this
will be one of the favorite options: A valet park feature that allows the car to drive itself through a lot . . . find a space . . . and park -- and comes back when
summoned.

The Valet feature will park the car for you - and pick you up when you're ready.
Nissan

Shopping at the mall will never be the same.

"It will come when the autonomous car is ready
to go on the road," said Carla Bailo, senior vice president of research
and development for Nissan America.

"But I don’t want to wait for that,"
Petersen said.

"I’m quite fond of that feature myself,"
Bailo laughed. "This is
the era that we are headed into. It's completely revolutionary. It is going to change
the way we manufacture and develop vehicles, no doubt."

This past week Nissan's autonomous
car was on display at the Detroit Auto Show. But virtually every automaker is chasing the idea of a self-driving car.

Mercedes is testing one on the streets of Germany. This year, Volvo will have its self-drive car on
Swedish roads. Google is among companies with one in the U.S.

They're all racing to have a fully-autonomous
car for sale by the end of the decade . . . an automobile revolution with one
overriding goal: safety.

"If your ultimate goal is zero fatalities, you
have to have the cars being able to manage themselves," said Bailo. "The
final role of autonomous should be zero fatalities."

That requires sensors on the car: stereo
cameras that look forward and behind; radar and sonar and infrared to sense
objects all around; and the software to react.

Nissan
even studied fish, said Bailo: "Primarily with their movements, and the way they are able to get huge amounts
or huge quantities through small areas, and again with their sensory perception to go the right way and not hit one another. We needed to duplicate those same kind of systems which is what our lasers and radar
are doing for us."

Like, gauging movements of other cars when merging into traffic, or spotting an
absent-minded pedestrian at a crosswalk.

In fact, the revolution is already an evolution,
with some self-drive technology now in use, like the car that parallel-parks itself, or sees a child behind the
car and hits the brakes faster than a human may react.

Charles Kawashima,
a senior engineer with Mercedes Benz, took Petersen for a spin in the new S-Class
Mercedes with technology now available in 2014 models. Once on the highway, Kawashima activated the
Distronic Plus steering assist.

It was Mercedes
that first popularized technology now standard in cars, like air bags and anti-lock brakes.

When this car's
sensors identify a drift across a lane, the steering wheel warns the driver
with a slight tug back to the center.

And the car can
spot trouble well before a distracted driver. Say goodbye to rear-end
collisions.

From 1956: A future vision of driverless cars

When the car slowed down, Kawashima said, "The car's doing
that. I didn't touch the brake pedals at
all."

The reality is this
car is helping the driver, because
the driver is probably least efficient and slowest to react. And, Kawashima said, the car could react a
lot faster than a person would in an emergency.
"In certain situations, scanning the distance between the vehicle
in front of me, and my own vehicle, the vehicle does that very efficiently,"
he said.

It's been a long time coming. A General
Motors display at the 1939 World's Fair drew lines two miles long to see
self-driving cars. By 1956, the dream was updated, in
a promotional film produced by GM. It foresaw hands-off steering in cars under
automatic control by 1976. [Click on the video player at left to watch this wonderful short film - and it's a musical!]

At General Motors’ Milford, Mich., proving ground, Jeremy
Salinger let Petersen take GM’s real autonomous car of the future for a spin.

"The car has a camera that is looking at the lane
markers, and sees that there's a solid lane marker on the left, dashed lane
markers on the right," said Salinger. "It knows that it’s supposed to
stay in this lane, so it's going to follow those."